I have succumbed to temptation several times in this space, to discuss the eternal question of which came first: the chicken or the egg? And I’ve come down on the side of the egg on a majority of those occasions. Now, science has confirmed I was right!
A true conundrum…
I’ve looked at the question from a number of angles and always come to more or less the same conclusion. But I’ve also encountered theories which challenged my staunch beliefs.
One problem I’ve struck the wall on more than once was, “What constitutes a genuine, authentic chicken?”
“Would it not,” one counter-opinion proposed, “require a fully-evolved chicken to lay an egg that produced a ‘proper’ chicken-as-we-know it?”
Science now says, it’s valid to consider a direct precursor of the modern chicken as a legitimate proto-chicken. You just have to establish a clear evolutionary path from the dinosaur to the Rhode Island Red.
And that’s what they’ve done.
Enter Luis Villazon
Louis is a science and technology educator who also trained in zoology. “Eggs are much older than chickens,” he recently told BBC Science Focus. That settles the questioin of whether eggs – as a concept – predate chickens. But leaves the notion of a ‘chicken egg’ hanging.
“Dinosaurs laid eggs, the fish that first crawled out of the sea laid eggs,” Villazon observes. “And the weird articulated monsters that swam in the warm shallow seas of the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago also laid eggs.”
Fast forward 499,990,000 years…
Humans only started breeding chickens about 10,000 years ago. There were a number of bird species at that time, in various parts of the world, whose eggs humans gathered and ate on a regular bases. It’s now believed that someone in Southeast Asia cross-bred, or ‘hyrbridised’, a red jungle fowl with grey jungle fowl and produced… the first chicken.
“At some point in evolutionary history when there were no chickens,” Villazon explains. “Two birds that were almost-but-not-quite chickens mated, and laid an egg that hatched into the first chicken.”
My take
I’m more than happy to accept Villazon’s explanation of how the egg came first. But I’m equally sure there remain chicken-firsters out there who will continue to debate the question.
I’ll also be happy that it’s no longer me who’s lying awake at night, agonizing over the issue…
~ Maggie J.